Judy Shelton, one of President Donald Trump’s potential picks for two vacant seats on the Federal Reserve Board, is taking a hard stance on interest rates, which she wants to reduce to 0% in one to two years, according to an interview with The Washington Post last week.
If Shelton was appointed she told the Post she “would lower rates as fast, as efficiently, as expeditiously as possible.”
Shelton has been in talks with the White House about the opening on the Federal Reserve’s board, but there hasn’t been any formal announcement of her candidacy. She did serve as an economic adviser to Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Shelton’s stance is most likely favored by the president, who has been screaming for the Fed to cut interest rates for more than a year now. Trump recently told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that the stock market would be “10,000 points higher” if the Fed had cut interest rates instead of raising them nine times over the last three years.
The president continued his campaign against the Fed and current Chairman Jerome Powell on Monday when he tweeted that the central bank “doesn’t know what it is doing” concerning interest rates.
Trump added in a second tweet: “Think of what it could have been if the Fed had gotten it right. Thousands of points higher on the Dow, and GDP in the 4’s or even 5’s. Now they stick, like a stubborn child, when we need rates cuts, & easing, to make up for what other countries are doing against us. Blew it!”
Tensions between Trump and Powell have been no secret. Bloomberg reported last week that the president had asked White House lawyers to look into ways of legally removing Powell from the board back in February. Trump’s team determined it would be legally questionable to remove Powell or demote him without cause — of which not lowering interest rates when the president sees fit does not qualify for the politically independent central bank.
